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Obituary

My friend Omar killed himself. Many residents who grew close to him considered him family. They recounted his encyclopedic knowledge of film, his affection for pets and for walking dogs, and his repertoire of philosophical rants that some found incomprehensible. He was always smartly dressed in clothes rooted from donation bags left out front of…

My parents’ cat George died today. He was pretty old, and had been suffering from diabetes and digestive problems for a long time. George, if I remember correctly, came to our family through a friend of my brother, who found the little guy as a kitten at a construction site. He was tiny when they…

And so dada Ali, bert camembert, the dingo Virgin, divided alien and his other 12 selves prepare to pass up the oily way and back to the planet of love. And I rejoice and give thanks,” [Daevid Allen’s son Orlando Monday Allen] wrote. “Thanks to you dear dear daevid for introducing me to my family of magick brothers and mystic sisters, for revealing the mysteries, you were the master builder but now have made us all the master builders. As the eternal wheel turns we will continue your message of love and pass it around. We are all one, we are all gong. Rest well my friend, float off on our ocean of love. The gong vibration will forever sound and its vibration will always lift and enhance. You have left such a beautiful legacy and we will make sure it forever shines in our children and their children. Now is the happiest time of yr life. Blessed be.”

I will write more at some point about how psychedelic music changed my life, but long story short, I was introduced to Gong at a time when I was particularly tripped out. Their version of reality has influenced my version of reality. I have no idea where Daevid is now, just as I have no idea where John Overmyer is right now. We travel, I believe, from one layer of the infinite multiverse to the next layer, just as other life forms go through metamorphoses. We don’t know where we’re ending up. DMT may be the key/a>

I have at least two Daevid Allen autographs… and I have admit both times I saw what remained of Gong, outside of meeting Daevid, the show was, well, underwhelming. But meeting Daevid was, for me, so affirming. Because I could tell he really DID believe his schtick about flying teapots and ziggurats and pothead pixies.

I’m looking forward to seeing you again, Daevid. Or not. I just want to say thanks, thanks a million, for pointing me in the right direction[s].

Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.

Mr. Nimoy announced that he had the disease last year, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.

UPDATE:I guess I’m going to take this moment to indulge in a what’s probably too much information about my personal and peculiar beliefs about what happens after we “die”. So here’s what I think, not that you asked.

I believe in the multiverse and I believe in a ongoing -although in some cases finite- consciousness. I believe my body is analogous to my car and that my consciousness is analogous to the driver. The body, like the car, wears out and dies. The driver moves on. How does this happen? The pineal gland is the key: that the DMT the pineal gland releases as we die facilitates the exit of our essential consciousness[es] to whatever multiverse is next.

So I’m sad today that Leonard Nimoy is gone. But I am sad for me and for everyone else that will miss him. I’m not sad for Nimoy himself: in fact I’m delighted he shed his worn out, dying body and that his journey continues. So far as I’m concerned, he may very well be boldly going where no man has gone before, and I for one can’t wait for that day myself. It’s not a religious thing with me, just a conclusion I’ve come to.